I have really mixed feelings about this book which I am finding quite hard to process. Now that I’ve got to the end, if you asked me what I thought, I’d tell you that I absolutely loved it, that it was fast paced and exciting and had so many twists that I just couldn’t guess what was going to happen next.

But if you’d asked me a few days ago while I was still less than half way through the book, I’d tell you that I was struggling with it being quite slow to get in to, and some parts of it seemed quite long and drawn out and I wasn’t really engaged with the plot at all.

Overall for me, I think the latter two-thirds of the book outweight the first, so I will definitely go on to read the second book in the series, I just wish the first part had been a bit more exciting. I understand that there was a lot of back-story to unravel and a lot of setup before we could get to the heart-racing action towards the end, but I did almost give up at one point.

One thing that I think really affected the pacing towards the start of the book was the ‘interludes’, which seemed to come quite often in order to give some back-story about the Gentlemen Bastard’s history, and I could see why they were needed in order for us to understand some of the decisions that were being made, but for me it felt like there were too many of them.

Books like The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson make use of interludes, but there are far fewer of them (although they are longer), and they seem to have less of an effect on the pacing of the overall story.

As I said, now that I’ve finished, I will definitely go on to read the second book in this series, and I’m hoping that it will be a bit more gripping all the way through!